Possibly? Or maybe people will think twice about deadnaming you.

Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up

Wait, what?

Real question here: has anyone else had luck side-stepping the Live365 signup during/after install? I’ve done this, and I’m very confused that more people haven’t.

Hate that my government is apparently dead set on all of us driving massive trucks and SUVs spending thousands to money lenders, auto manufacturers, and dealerships over realist vehicles.

Doubly so if those parties are campaign contributors. Always follow the money.

I’ll preface this by saying this shady shit gets all my hate.

It’s tempting to opt for telematics/black box insurance because of the initial cheaper prices but the privacy violations and potential downsides make it not worth it.

The overall problem here is that human psychology tends to frame this difference as a loss not a gain. Given the choice, people will see the cheaper option as the baseline, and then ask “can I afford to pay more for privacy?” instead of affirming “my privacy is not worth this discount.”

Also, those of us that have paid for insurance without such a “discount”, are likely keenly aware of the difference. For new drivers, from now to here on out, the lack of past experience presents a new baseline where this awfulness is normalized. Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since the “privacy free” option is still profitable and is enticing for new customers (read: younger, poorer). So it’ll take some kind of law, collective action, or government intervention to make this go away.

Have fun fighting with your insurance to get them to remove anything from your record. […] If I had spyware insurance they would’ve dinged me for it.

I think this is the bigger problem. If someone has the data an insurance company wants, you probably agreed to an EULA or signed something that makes their ownership, and its sale, legal. With the “yeah go ahead and use my data” option on the table, the machinery to do this without your knowledge is already in place. All the insurance provider has to do is buy the data from someone else. When the price is right, 1st party spyware isn’t required at all.

Never understood the appeal honestly.

Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:

• Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
• Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
• The game has a dozen or more such heroes
• icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
• at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I’m not in a league/clan/whatever

From this I could deduce:

• There’s no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
• Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
• Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
• League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
• Causal play is out; likely can’t pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times

I’m not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It’s too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I’m familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn’t overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn’t steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.

Wait, Oreos are actually bad?

I can only think of two plausible interpretations of this concept.

1. Mage is broke as hell and cobbled together his own grimoire by hand-copying spells from the college library, friends, and the occasional dungeon find. Yeah, a few occult incantations slipped in there, but you’d hardly notice for all the doodles and random “todo” lists from years ago.

2. Death note.

Either way

No worries, just eject the lead from a cheap Bic mechanical pencil, and use the tip to carefully bend 'em back into shape.

I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop on USB-C/Thunderbolt. Don’t get me wrong - I think it’s a massive improvement for standardization and peripheral capability everywhere. But I have a hard-used Thinkpad that’s on and off the charging cable all day, constantly getting tugged in every possible direction. I’m afraid the physical port itself is going to give up long before the rest of the machine does. I’m probably going to need Louis Rossmann level skills to re-solder it when the time comes.

Edit: I’m also wondering if the sudden fragility of peripheral connections (e.g. headphones, classic iPod, USB mini/micro) and the emergence of the RoHS standard (lead-free solder) is not a coincidence.

Oh wow, I didn’t see that coming. Screw-terminal cable connections are now the Manual Transmission of computer parts.

Fighting games and the absolutely lowest possible video latency with the tech available. VGA puts you literally a frame or two ahead of the opponent. For players at their peak, this is a pretty big advantage.

That’s one advantage to living in the 21st century: computer “bone yards” and trash-picked parts are stupidly high quality “trash” compared to decades ago.

All I can say is that we are fortunate that the overlap between “VGA ports everywhere” and “battery operated impact drivers” is almost zero on the timeline. Imagine trying to unscrew a VGA plug by hand that was tightened down to ugga-dugga-foot-pounds of torque. Of course that assumes that didn’t shear the screws first.

Also, biscuits and gravy, wtf

I may lose my Yank card for this, but I’m not a fan myself. That said, it’s just scones and bechamel sauce. Hearty, meaty, salty and what you can do with the rendered fat from greasy breakfast sausage*. It’s basically hangover food that caught on.

(* There’s a subset of traditional American food that stems from doing a lot with very little, while having a complete disregard for cholesterol and calorie intake. Assuming that wheat and dairy are the cheapest things in your pantry, you get stuff like this. See “scrapple” for another example.)

I look at it the other way around. The food was so horrible, England sent entire fleets of ships just to get takeout from India. It didn’t matter that it took months on end and people lost their lives along the way, it was still worth it.

What frustrates me the most about this is that if we promote one commercial solution to the top of the heap, destroying all others, we still lose.

Exactly. Everyone involved understood the assignment.

Well except for the computer science, but that much is obvious.

And that’s never good. But as a computer scientist, I am of the opinion that the real thing is rarely as compelling as The Imitation Game, and even that was about people more than math/science. I’m on board with writers having fun with this stuff because it sort of challenges us to do better out in the world.

For instance, Hackers was not a wildly-off-target take on what computing was like. Rather it’s what we wanted computing to look like.

I don’t believe in a no-win scenario.

• James T. Kirk